Uncle Hitch

All in all - he was just a man - the likes of which we may not see again


When yours truly began reconstructing neoism xforming it into daemoneoconservatism - the Brit Cats played a major role ala injecting ideals of interventions into the mix. Reaching out to the fab four  - Uncle Tony, Douglas Murray, Edward Beaman and Uncle Chris.


The ungodly - yet delightfully daemoneoconic avuncular Christopher Hitchens was kind enough to respond to sev emails with some bloody great insight.

It was the Balkans Action Council that appealed to me. These people wanted to act. That war in the early 1990's changed a lot for me, Courtney.

I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full dress reprise of konzentration lager, mass murder of civilians, the constitution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I never expected so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists!

This was a time when many on the left were saying "Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse" or, "Don't intervene, it might destabilize the region..." And I thought - destabilization of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care care about the stability of undemocratic regimes?


It was a time when the left was mostly taking the status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing.

That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. There's Joshua Muravchik. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying we had to act.

Hitch always wrote what he knew to be true and suffered no moral equivalency with out spitting razor blades. And never really gave a dang what anyone thought about it either.

It's quite good that you and your mates take Strauss's admonishments to heart regarding relativism. "Which one of these things is not like the other thing" is spot on. As for the rest of his work, like you, I never quite understood it. 

I do enjoy GsGf and your irreverent disregard for long held 'truths' in the international discourse and the jabberwocky style does the Queen's a welcome new kink. Keep writing and learning.

Pic - "Requiescat in pace 1949 - 2011"